Blackwell’s Manchester are thrilled to welcome Natalie Adler to Blackwell’s in partnership with the University of Manchester’s Centre for Sexuality Studies and Culture.

Natalie will be discussing her debut novel, Waiting On A Friend, set amidst the AIDs crisis in 1980s New York. Natalie will be in conversation with Dr Monica Pearl, senior lecturer and veteran of ACT UP New York.

Doors: 6.30pm, Starts: 6.45pm

General admission is £5, or included in the price of a Book & Ticket.

About Waiting On A Friend:

East Village, summer of 1984. Renata is a young dyke-about-town who has the ability to see ghosts, which has been happening more and more frequently as her friends have started dying of what has recently been named AIDS.

So, when her best friend Mark dies, she assumes she’ll see him again. There’s no way Mark wouldn’t give her a chance to say goodbye, would he? But to her disappointment – and increasingly, her concern – Mark doesn’t appear.

Renata has other problems, too. A mysterious, police-like force has begun ridding their East Village neighbourhood of anything abnormal or inexplicable. At first, she’s sure they’re scam artists, but it becomes clear they’re actually trapping ghosts. With her band of lovably eccentric pals and lovers, Renata is determined to fight back against the erasure of her friends’ memories and the sanitizing of her beloved New York.

About the author:

Natalie Adler is an editor at Lux magazine. She was a 2022-23 Susan Kamil Emerging Writer Fellow at the Center for Fiction. She has an MFA in fiction from Brooklyn College and a PhD in comparative literature from Brown University. She is from New Jersey and lives in New York City.